How to stop waiting for happiness and start enjoying life

2002 Summer. I'm sitting by the fire with my college boyfriend and his friends. He is a year younger than me and will continue to study in the fall. I'm moving to Washington and getting my first job.

Although we are moving in different directions, we are not yet ready to end the relationship. In a fit of inspiration, I say:

Let's go to Iceland!
— To Iceland? He looks at me very strangely.
- Yes! It's beautiful there and I really want to see the aurora.

I don't remember his answer, but my boyfriend certainly wasn't enthusiastic. We broke up two months later.

For me, Iceland was a symbol. A compatibility indicator and a dream that I wanted to fulfill with my loved one. I felt that I needed a partner to be happy. Moreover, every time something good happened to me, I thought: “Of course, all this is great, but I will only be truly happy when I find a loved one.”

When I moved into a beautiful apartment, I imagined the dinners I could host if I had a partner: “I will be happy when I find someone with whom I can share this space.”

When I got promoted, I went to a bar to celebrate with friends and thought, "I'll be happy when I'm no longer the only lonely person at this table."

And when I saw photos of my friends and their boyfriends or girlfriends from vacation, I said to myself: “I will be happy when there is someone nearby who will go to Iceland with me.”

Here they are, the very four words that kill joy: "I will be happy when ...".

Perhaps you know them or know their siblings: “When I get over…, I will feel better” and “If I had…, my life would be better.”

We say these words all the time without attaching much importance to them. We consider them harmless, just an expression of our desires. But in fact, the habit of saying "I will be happy when ..." is more dangerous than it seems. Because it's not just a phrase. This is a mindset that makes us wait for happiness instead of cultivating joy in the here and now.

Why happiness and joy are two different things

We often take the words “happiness” and “joy” interchangeably. But in reality they mean completely different things.

Happiness is how we evaluate our lives over time. It is synonymous with what psychologists call subjective well-being and includes a variety of factors: health, work, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, social connections.

Joy is what we feel in the moment. This is a strong instant surge of positive emotions. We can always determine that we are experiencing joy, because we feel it not only with the mind, but also with the body. We laugh and smile, our back straightens, and our soul becomes warm and light. Joy makes us feel energized, uplifted, and alive.

Since happiness is a rather complex and complex feeling, we do not always understand what can make us happy. Many are accustomed to associate happiness with important life stages: finding love, career take-off, buying a home, having a child. We tell ourselves that all this will help to finally add the last piece to the puzzle of our life and give us a happy ending, like in a fairy tale. But in reality, we are rarely able to predict what will really make us happy.

A study examining the happiness levels of lottery winners showedP. Brickman, D. Coates, et al. Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? / Journal of Personality and Social Psychologythat in a year their indicators differed little from those of other people. Of course, grand events make us feel better. But over time, we begin to look for a new goal and again return to the thought "I will be happy when ...".

Another important detail is that we are not able to control how and when significant events will occur in our lives. So when we obsess over them, we are sabotaging the joy we can have right now. In other words, in our search for happiness, we put off joy until later. How?

We spend less time with the people we love so we can work more and get promoted. We don't have time for hobby, because we are recruiting new projects to move forward.

We do not equip a rented apartment, because we are saving money for a down payment on a mortgage, and as a result we live in a boring “box”.

We are postponing the trip to Iceland until we find a suitable companion. And then, flipping through social networks, we think that everyone around us is living a full life while we are sitting somewhere on the sidelines.

Focusing too much on events that may not happen deprives us of the opportunity to create joy in the present. Every time you say to yourself "I'll be happy when..." you really mean "I can't be happy now". And if this is true and you are missing some important element for an ideal life, then there is no need to try.

The habit of saying “I will be happy when...” makes us live in the expectation that everything will work out by itself, and not build our own destiny. Makes us passive, as if our life is just a show, and we are the audience, who are looking forward to what the writers will come up with interesting things in the next series.

In fact, we create our own life, which means that we need to be active. It's time to stop dreaming and searching for the missing piece of the puzzle and start living and enjoying life.

How to stop waiting for happiness

I was in a relationship for most of 2011 and things were going pretty well. We went to Bermuda for the wedding of my childhood best friend. While I was doing the typical duties of a bridesmaid, he had a couple of cocktails in the city and came to the ceremony drunk. From that moment on, everything went wrong. In an attempt to figure out if our couple could be saved, I suggested to him: “Let's go to Iceland!” He welcomed the idea with a level of enthusiasm that I already knew.

Two days later I booked a trip to Iceland for New Year. Lonely. “You can come with me if you want. You only need to buy a ticket,” I told my boyfriend. We broke up after a few weeks.

On New Year's Eve, I crossed lava fields and bathed in geothermal pools all alone. Do you know what happened when, after 10 years of thinking and waiting, I finally ended up in Iceland? I found joy!

I contacted an artist about whom I once wrote an article. She ended up inviting me to celebrate the New Year with her family, and I enjoyed the fireworks over Reykjavik with three generations of Icelanders. I ate fish and fries and wrote in my diary. I booked a trip to the Snaefellsnes peninsula where I drank hot chocolate and sang folk songs with a crowd of farmers in an inn. I met new friends that I reunited with a couple of years ago in Copenhagen. And I finally saw the aurora, which turned out to be much more fabulous than I imagined!

We often ignore joy because it seems like a distraction to our path to happiness.

But, despite the fact that moments of joy are small and fleeting, they perform a very important function: they expand our world. I think that when we wait for happiness, we freeze in place. As if we are on a desert island and try not to do anything, worrying that if we move, the rescuers will not find us.

Focusing on the present instead of looking forward to the future has taught me that something unexpected always happens. Sometimes it's new adventure, and it leaves behind memories that would never exist if you continued to passively wait for happiness. Sometimes it’s new friends, opportunities, or inspiration—something that can bring you closer to happiness or allow you to rethink it. Whenever that happiness comes into your life, you will wait for it, living every day with joy.

Despite all this, I can't pretend that I never say to myself "I'll be happy when..." at all. During the pandemic, I often fantasized about how great it would be to go to a cafe with a child or send him to a music class without thinking about the coronavirus.

But I realized that the expectation of happiness is just a habit, and you can get rid of it. Now, when I catch myself thinking “I will be happy when…”, I imagine a future version of myself that looks back to today. And then I ask: “How would I like to spend this time?” This question always brings joy, because I never answer: "Waiting for change." My usual answer is: "Living my best life the way it is."

The expectation of happiness is often rooted in perfectionism, which is based on our idea of ​​​​an ideal life and compares everything around us to it. However, any discrepancy disappoints us. And considering that nothing is perfect, even when we get what we want, it seems to us that we still fall short of our fantasies.

Joy, on the contrary, begins with us. She lives in our imperfect life and asks us what we can do to make our life fun and interesting, so that we wake up every day with a sense of inspiration. It forces us to look at life creatively, and not compare it with an unattainable ideal.

I again went to Iceland in 2016, 5 years after the first trip. This time with her husband Albert. We've seen puffins nesting on the side of a cliff, picked wild blueberries, and even visited an elf school! And you know what? This trip was better, simply because I was already in Iceland. New memories intertwined with old ones, and I was happy to introduce the person I love to a special place for me. I have never regretted giving up.

What are you waiting for to be happy? And what will happen if you stop waiting and start creating your joy right now?